The author's bio in this article read as follows: "Professor Roger J. Spiller is Deputy Director of the
Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas."

Since then, Dr. Spiller authored "Not War
But Like War: The American Intervention in Lebanon" (Combat Studies Institute,
US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, January
1981). He also served as an editor for the American Library's World War II
journalism volumes.

S.L.A. Marshall as he appeared on his book
Sinai Victory in 1958.

In 1947, a slim book entitled Men Against Fire: The Problem
of Battle Command in Future War made the
reputation of S.L.A. Marshall.

During the war, Marshall was employed as a
popular historian with a newspaperman's talent for getting a story through
interviews. Indeed, the best parts of Men Against Fire are soldier's
folk wisdom about staying alive.

But that aspect of his book did not make
Marshall's reputation as a social scientist of the battlefield. The book's central argument
did. Marshall stated:

In an average experienced infantry company in an
average day's action, the number engaging with any
and all weapons was approximately 15 per cent of the total strength. In the
most aggressive companies, under the most intense local pressure, the figure
rarely rose above 25 percent of the total strength from the opening to the
close of the action.

Marshall's claims certainly raised eyebrows in disbelief.
Significantly, his "ratio of fire" does not appear in the official history series, The United States in World
War II.
Nonetheless, Marshall found many followers among the gullible. It wasn't
until 1988 that a scholarly article set the record straight.

The article, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire," appeared in the British journal, The
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. The author was
professor Roger J. Spiller, and his task was an unpleasant one because he
believed that Marshall was basically right about the primacy of ground
combat. Nonetheless, Spiller pulled no punches. He writes:

Marshall had no use for the polite
equivocations of scholarly discourse. His way of proving doubtful
propositions was to state them more forcefully. Righteousness was always
more important for Marshall than evidence....

The foundation of his conviction was not scholarship but his
own military experience, experience that he inflated or revised as the
situation warranted. Marshall often hinted broadly that he had commanded
infantry in combat, but his service dossier shows no such service. He
frequently held that he had been the youngest officer in the American
Expeditionary Forces during the Great War, but this plays with the truth as
well. Marshall enlisted in 1917 and served with the 315th Engineer Regiment—then
part of the 90th Infantry Division—and won a commission after the
Armistice, when rapid demobilization required very junior officers to
command "casual" and depot companies as the veteran officers went home.
Marshall rarely drew such distinctions, however, leaving his audiences to
infer that he had commanded in the trenches. Later in life, he remarked that
he had seen five wars as a soldier and 18 as a correspondent, but his
definitions of war and soldiering were rather elastic. That he had seen a
great deal of soldiers going about their deadly work was no empty boast,
however. This mantle of experience, acquired in several guises, protected
him throughout his long and prolific career as a military writer, and his
aggressive style intimidated those who would doubt his arguments. Perhaps
inevitably, his readers would mistake his certitude for authority.

What of Marshall's claims for his research in
the field during World War II? Spiller writes:

In Men Against Fire Marshall
claims to have interviewed "approximately" 400 infantry rifle companies in
the Pacific and in Europe, but that number tended to change over the years.
In 1952, the number had somehow grown to 603 companies; five years later his
sample had declined to "something over 500" companies. Those infantry
companies—whatever their actual number—were his laboratories, the
infantrymen his test subjects, and at the focal point of his research was
the ratio of fire. "Why the subject of fire ratios under combat conditions
has not been long and searchingly explored, I don't know," Marshall wrote.
"I suspect that it is because in earlier wars there had never existed the
opportunity for systematic collection of data." [Emphasis added.]

Opportunity aplenty existed in Europe:
more than 1200 rifle companies did their work between June 1944 and V-E day,
10 months later. But Marshall required by his own standard two and sometimes
three days with a company to examine one day's combat. By the most generous
calculation, Marshall would have finished "approximately" 400 interviews
sometime in October or November 1946, or at about the time he was
writing Men Against Fire.

This calculation assumes, however,
that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company
during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his
weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview,
would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and
that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was
devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover,
usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not
recall Marshall's everasking this question. Nor does Westover recall
Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many
private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he
was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs
of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio
as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against
Fire. The "systematic collection of
data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have
been an invention.

Puncturing the Marshall legend was Dr.
Spiller's duty rather than his pleasure. He ended his piece this way:

History has a savage way about it. A
reputation may be made or unmade when history seizes upon part of a life and
reduces it to caricature. S.L.A. Marshall was one of the most important
commentators on the soldier's world in this century. The axiom upon which so
much of his reputation has been built overshadows his real contribution.
Marshall's insistence that modern warfare is best understood through the
medium of those who actually do the fighting stands as a challenge to the
disembodied, mechanistic approaches that all too often are the mainstay of
military theorists and historians alike.

The S.L.A. Marshall Military History Collection at the University of Texas
at El Paso is the main repository for Marshall's official and personal
correspondence, draft manuscripts, and ephemera.

A considerable body of correspondence between Marshall and B.H. Liddell Hart
is collected at the B.H. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's
College, London.

The US Army Military History Institute, US Army War College, Carlisle
Barracks, PA, holds several of Marshall's field notebooks.

For Marshall on Marshall, see almost anything he wrote but specifically:
S.L.A. Marshall, "Genesis to Revelation," Military Review, Vol. 52,
No. 2 (February 1972); "The Human Equation in Combat", in S.L.A. Marshall
at Fort Leavenworth: Five Lectures at the US Army Command and General Staff
College, ed. by Roger J. Spiller (US Army Command and General Staff
College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1980).

And...

Dale L. Walker, interview with S.L.A. Marshall, 18 May 1972, typed
transcript, in S.L.A. Marshall Military History Collection, Library of the
University of Texas at El Paso, Texas.

To understand the intellectual climate when Men Against Fire
was published, see: Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic
Power and the World Order (Brace Harcourt, New York, 1946), p. 76.
Brodie's axiom on deterrence was stated: "Thus far the chief purpose of our military
establishment has been to win wars. From now on, its chief purpose must be
to avert them. It can have almost no other purpose."